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Erica Jong

American novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

Erica Jong (born 26 March 1942) is an American author and educator. Born in New York City, Jong graduated from Barnard College in 1963. She is best known for her first novel, Fear of Flying (published in 1973), which created a sensation with its frank treatment of a woman's sexual desires.

Erica Jong in 2013

Quotes

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My advice to a young writer: Never give up. Read everything you can read — particularly the writers who move you deeply. Study how they do what they do. Read and read and read ... and write and write and write.
 
I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer.
  • I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.
  • I have had the experience of having my sister get up at a meeting at Columbia University, where these scholars from all over the world were anointing Fear of Flying as a classic. And my sister got up and said, "Erica Jong has ruined my life — with her books."
  • My advice to a young writer: Never give up. Read everything you can read — particularly the writers who move you deeply. Study how they do what they do. Read and read and read ... and write and write and write.

Fear of Flying (1973)

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  • Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love...
  • Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.
    • (About Men)
  • The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.
  • Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
  • I'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion.
  • Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel.
  • I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
  • The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job.
  • Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
  • I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.
  • Sheer bitchiness can be a sort of style.
  • It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.
  • Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.
  • Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.

How to Save Your Own Life (1977)

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  • I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world...
  • Having a baby with him meant marrying that face forever.
  • All people believe their suffering is greater than others.
  • Humor is a survival tool.
  • How could one create life with someone who represented death?
  • Inevitably, I drank too much, talked too much, smiled too hard, swallowed back too much bile.
  • My body was flesh, which was only one step removed from shit, from clay, from dust.
  • Keeping a journal implies hope.
  • The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach.
  • And what if I don't want forgiveness?
  • Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't...
  • Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends.
  • It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.
  • They all cheat sooner or later. You might as well have one who isn't a bore the rest of the time.
  • ...jealousy makes the prick grow harder. And the cunt wetter.
  • Love is love, but marriage is an investment.
  • Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
  • Without sex it would be so easy to choose appropriate people to live with. Sex was the joker in an otherwise rational deck.
  • Loving someone is a loss of freedom -- but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
  • There is a rhythm to the ending...
  • Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage -- however often we are hurt as a result of it.
  • If you apologize for something that isn't your fault in the first place, you, in effect, confirm their belief that it is your fault.
  • Is perception equivalent to existence?
  • Photographs... are the most curious indicators of reality.
  • ...the ocean kept falling into itself, gathering itself up, and falling into itself again.
  • The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.
  • What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to deceive?
  • I only know that in our choice of friends and lovers and teachers who will change our lives, we are guided by forces which have nothing to do with the rationalizations we give.
  • Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)

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  • Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.
  • Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye...
  • Betrayal does that -- betrays the betrayer.
  • It is our old love I love.
  • I look forward and see myself look back.
  • In loving life you love what can't survive...
  • Why does life need evidence of life?
  • I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.
  • ...I am sure that when we love we are better than ourselves and when we hate, worse.
  • The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
  • Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry...
  • Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along.
  • Hate generalizes; love is particular.
  • Because I loved myself, I was loved.
  • ...if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

"Blood and Guts: The Tricky Problem of Being a Woman Writer in the Late Twentieth Century"

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In The Writer on Her Work edited by Janet Sternburg (2000)

  • For women writers the systematic discouragement even to attempt to become writers has been so constant and pervasive a force that we cannot consider their literary productions without somehow assessing the effects of that barrage of discouragement.
  • For women writers the systematic discouragement even to attempt to become writers has been so constant and pervasive a force that we cannot consider their literary productions without somehow assessing the effects of that barrage of discouragement. Often discouraged in the home, often at school, often by families and spouses, the rare woman writer who does not lose her determination along the way is already a survivor. That one should next have to face the systematic discouragement of a male-oriented literary establishment is absurd and sad but nonetheless a real fact of life for many women writers.* (No one has chronicled this repression better than Tillie Olsen in her splendid book Silences (1978).) The truth is that many of us are doomed to do our best work in an atmosphere of condescension and loneliness. Yet perhaps there is some sense in which that lack of establishment approval is a blessing, for an artist must learn (the sooner the better) that he or she works for the work itself, not for approval, and it is easier to establish that sense of creative independence when approval is lacking than when one is seduced by it.
  • school is a microcosm of our society's values.
  • Sexism is somewhat better hidden now-though it is far from eradicated.
  • when I go to read my work at colleges, I find the students reading and discussing contemporary writing by women as if there never had been a time when a Distinguished Critic could say "Women can't be writers"-even in jest. I am grateful and glad for that change, but it has not been won without pain.
  • Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness, anger that does not know its own name. And nothing is more freeing for a woman (or for a woman writer) than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One's Own, many women's books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but then the spirit must be nurtureed.
  • The myths about women were mostly ways of keeping us out of touch with our own strength, and this confused many generations of women.
  • when I look back on the years since I left college, and I try to sum up what I have learned, it is precisely that: not to fear change, not to expect my life to be immutable.
  • Every poem, every page of fiction I have written, has been written with anxiety, occasionally panic, always uncertainty about its reception.
  • As a writer, I feel that the very source of my inspiration lies in my never forgetting how much I have in common with other women, how many ways in which we are all-successful or not-similarly shackled. I do not write about superwomen who have transcended all conflict; I write about women who are torn, as most of us are torn, between the past and the future, between our mothers' frustrations and the extravagant hopes we have for our daughters. I do not know what a writer would write about if all her characters were superwomen, cleansed of conflict. Conflict is the soul of literature.
  • I would like to see a world in which male writers wrote without masculinist bias, in which for example Hemingway's masculinist mythology (and that of many other contemporary American male writers) was perceived as quite as bizarre and hysterical as the most absurd excesses of militant feminist fiction, and in which consciousness had become so truly androgynous that the adjective itself would be puzzlingly obsolete.
  • The human need for companionship and sexuality is far stronger than any intellectual theory
  • Righteousness has no place in literature. Of course the keen observer of her culture will feel deeply about the oppression she sees around her, the inhumanity of man to man, of man to woman, but her vision of it must be essentially personal, not abstractly political.
  • I must gratefully acknowledge that the second wave of the feminist movement liberated my writing and was a liberating influence upon my whole life. How? Not by supplying me with dogma, but by making it easier for me to look into myself and assume that what I felt as a woman was also shared by other women (and men). For one of the most positive by-products of the so-called second wave of the feminist movement was its discovery of a new audience of readers-readers both female and male-who came to realize that literary history as we previously knew it was the history of the literature of the white, the affluent, the male, and that the female side of experience had been almost completely omitted (except as seen through the eyes of the traditional victors in the war between the sexes-men).
  • My job is not to paralyze myself by anticipating judgment but to do the best I can and let the judgment fall where it may.
  • No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool.
  • It seems to me that having now created an entire literature of female rage, an entire literature of female introspection, women writers are ready to enter the next phase-the phase of empathy. Without forgetting how hard-won our rage was, without forgetting how many puritanical voices would still like to censor our sexuality, I think we must consider ourselves free to explore the whole world of feeling in our writings-and not to be trapped forever in the phase of discovering buried anger...The time has come to let go of that rage; the time has come to realize that curiosity is braver than rage, that exploration is a nobler calling than war.

Other

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  • Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.
    • Erica Jong's father (a musician, songwriter and later business man), his two pieces of advice for her. Given in the Times Literary Supplement, 7 October 1994, page 44.

Quotes about Erica Jong

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  • Many contemporary women writers and artists have attempted to work with new images drawn from an explicitly feminist consciousness or from a female sensibility pulled from the experiences of daily life and made explicit in the context of the women's liberation movement. The struggle to do this requires both the break-up of the interior colonization and the actualization of a women-centered reality. Erica Jong described this process in her own work as she came of age as a writer in the 1970s: "I spent my whole bookish life identifying with writers and nearly all the writers who mattered were men. Even though there were women writers and even though I read them and loved them, they did not seem to matter. If they were good, they were good in spite of being women. If they were bad, it was because they were women. I had, in short, internalized all the dominant cultural stereotypes, and the result was that I could scarcely even imagine a woman as an author." Once Jong could name the problem, however, and see herself as a writer, the content of her work changed: "I stopped writing about ruins and nightingales. I was able to make poetry out of the everyday activities of my life: peeling onions, a trip to the gynecologist, a student demonstration, my own midnight terrors and dreams-all things I would have previously dismissed as trivial."
    • Bettina Aptheker Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience (1989)
  • (Did you every read Fear of Flying?) G.P.: Well, that's another book that I really read part of several times and couldn't really finish. I thought it could have been done a lot faster and shorter…But again, that book was very important to a lot of women. I respect those facts, when people feel like that. I don't think it's just pure popularity; I don't think it's just that they were sold…But those books, those two books [The Women's Room and Fear of Flying], really were very important for lots of women.
    • 1981 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley Edited by Gerhard Bach & Blaine Hall (2013)
  • ... Jong presented millions of women readers with the possibility of — the great joys of — agency in place of soporific and joyless passivity in life and, of course, sex.
  • (Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?) Money. White authors often write about money (or don’t) in a way that disregards the realities of most people. It’s as if they assume that everyone simply has it. Or at least their readers. I remember reading “Fear of Flying,” by Erica Jong, many years ago, for instance, and getting very angry when the protagonist went to Europe for months with no concern for money or a job. I assumed she was relying on family money, but it was never explained. It took me out of the text because I couldn’t get over it. Maybe it’s because I grew up working class and money was a factor in everything we did. Marginalized people could never in their wildest dreams make these kinds of choices.
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